View the list of August and December 2021 OPWL graduates
Each semester OPWL has students graduating that provide above and beyond examples of classroom leadership, community building and collaboration, academic excellence, and professional growth. OPWL recognizes and celebrates these accomplishments and all of our student’s successful completion of their OPWL graduate study.
Academic Excellence: 4.0 GPA throughout the program.
August 2021 graduate recipients
- Jeannine Baker
- Katie Costolnick
- Mark Graff
- Lloyd Heflin
- Nicole Imler
- Victor McCraw
- Devin Terrell
- Ashley Vryheid
December 2021 graduate recipients
- Francis Denault
- Jodi Mammenga
- Rich Reitter
- Sharnice Christine Alexander Yates
OPWL Professional Community Contribution Award
- Lloyd Heflin
- Jeannine Baker
- Kambria Dumesnil
- Jodi Mammenga
Lloyd Heflin, Jeannine Baker and Kambria Dumesnil worked with a group of students to explore metacognition through collaborative autoethnography. Their paper “Going beyond thinking: Enhancing the velocity of learning through metacognition” was accepted by the AHRD conference.
Jodi Mammenga co-authored a book chapter “Real projects for real community clients: Combining eService Learning and project-based learning” with Drs. Villachica and Giacumo, and also co-presented at ISPI and ISPI EMEA conferences. Jodi also co-authored numerous technical reports.
Our Community Builder Award
Our Community Builder Award recognizes students that often lifted the learning experiences of their classmates and our classroom activities. They do this consistently and selflessly–and throughout their entire course of study. For this award, the OPWL faculty went through the nomination and finalist selection process.
August 2021 graduate recipient
- Victor McCraw
Instructors of Victor McCraw remember that Victor brought a vast amount of knowledge and experience to the classroom to facilitate quality discussions among students. With his contributions, the class could develop a healthy learning community from which all students could benefit. He is a reflective practitioner, and a model for a lifelong learner.
December 2021 graduate recipient
- Chris Lewis
Instructors of Chris Lewis remember that Chris always made a good contribution to the asynchronous discussions with thoughtful and reflective comments, and when there were live Zoom meetings, he also engaged in live discussions with quality comments. His contributions to the discussions positively affected the development of a learning community in the online classes.
Professional Growth
This is awarded to a student that entered the OPWL program as a brand new practitioner in the OPWL related fields but they exhibited considerable growth over the duration of their studies and developed themselves professionally.
August 2021 graduate recipient
- Gavin McClements
When Gavin started the OPWL master’s degree, he wasn’t new to the workplace environment. In fact, he had years of work experience as general managers in several organizations. But not as a learning and development professional. While starting out as a fiction writer who worked in a hotel, he wanted to become an instructional designer. Pursuing the OPWL master’s degree wasn’t easy because he did not have the learning and development environment where he could apply his new learning right away. But he persisted! Right before he completed his master’s degree, he landed an instructional designer job. He is now an instructional designer with Judge Learning Solutions.
December 2021 graduate recipient
- Sharnice Christine Alexander Yates
Sharnice is one of the good examples of those who successfully made the transition from the K-12 school environment to industry training and development positions. While pursuing the OPWL degree, Sharnice continuously sought her professional goals to step into the industry learning and development field, and she did land an industry training and development job! Instructors in her courses such as instructional design, e-learning development, needs assessment, and evaluation courses remember Sharnice as a great contributor to the discussions and an excellent team member during team projects.
OPWL Honors Graduate
OPWL Honors Graduate is our highest departmental honor – graduating with OPWL Honors. For this category, students first earned a cumulative GPA of a 4.0, second, they scored very high on their portfolio or thesis review, and their portfolio or thesis was designated by the reviewers as “Outstanding”. This outstanding designation represents particular fluency and eloquence in their knowledge and practice.
August 2021 graduate recipients
- Nicole Imler
- Victor McCraw
December 2021 graduate recipient
- Sharnice Christine Alexander Yates
About the OPWL Program
The Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL) program helps prepare students for careers in the areas of instructional design, training and development, e-learning, workplace performance improvement, organizational development, program evaluation and performance consulting.